Subhash Jaireth

And as a reader, I want it all.

Oh, thanks for having me in.

It's a privilege.

Oh, it's a book about books and poets and their poems and about cities where these books and poems were conceived and written.

I sort of conceived these essays, which I call them story essays.

as biographies and autobiographies of poems, books, and through them poets and writers and places.

It's almost similar to writing a biography of a person.

The technique here, what I use is, I call it looking through an object using a bifocal lens, or what my favorite Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin calls looking at an object in a

mala evremia, that is small time, and balsho evremia, that is great time.

So what I do is, when I look at the poem itself, it is I'm looking through microscopic lenses.

That is, it's small time, mala evremia.

And then I turn the binoculars and use the telescopic lens and focus on the world surrounding it and the history surrounding it and the whole culture surrounding it.

And that what Bakhshin calls his great time.

That's where the poetry, the poem, the book, the writer happens.

A bit.

As a geologist, I do feel that I have some experience of what nowadays it has become quite fashionable, the term deep time.

Deep time, as a geologist, I have a, you can say, palpable feeling about deep time because time, geological time is deep time and it's

Not only because we measure time in billions and millions of years, but also the time is buried in layers of rocks and sediments, and we analyze those rocks and time comes through.

and that's what deep time is and the same time because we are all human beings are made up of the same chemicals which were primordial that is derived when the earth was formed even before that so we also carry in ourselves particles of the deep time the plants the birds the animals

The air, the soil have imprints of that deep time in us.